PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has kept alive, for now, the Obama-era program that allows immigrants brought here as children to work and protects them from deportation. The high court on Thursday ruled that the Trump administration attempted to end the program improperly when it announced it was rescinding it in 2017. Since then, only people who were already enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have been able to stay on board, and no new applicants have been accepted. About 650,000 people have DACA protections. Here are six from around the country.
Joella Roberts
Age: 22
Lives: Washington, D.C.
Country of origin: Trinidad and Tobago
Joella Roberts was 4 when she came to the U.S. with her mom and brother in 2001. Her grandmother, who was already living in the states, petitioned to bring them as well, but their applications were delayed and they made the trip anyway. Eventually, Roberts was in the country without permission. She and her family were debating whether she should go back to Trinidad and Tobago and start fresh. An attorney told her about DACA around 2015, and she’s had the protection since. “I have like an artificial citizenship,” Roberts said. Having DACA allowed her to help her family, as she is the sole provider. She was able to finance a car and have credit.
Like many other DACA recipients, she is politically savvy and determined to use her skills to advocate for others like her. Roberts just graduated from college and is working as a university program coordinator for FWD.us, a bipartisan group that advocates for criminal justice and immigration reform.
Roberts said she couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. Thursday because of anxiety about the pending high court ruling. She jumped out of bed when she heard the news.
“I was like, finally, the Supreme Court is on the right side of justice and history and it’s been a really long, torturous couple of months,” Roberts said. She said that while she’s happy with the decision, there are still other things to fight for, like justice for black Americans— including black immigrants— killed by police.
Edison Suasnavas
Age: 33
Lives: Saratoga Springs, Utah
Country of origin: Ecuador
Edison Suasnavas would not be able to analyze cancer cells for a living without DACA. He has advanced biology degrees, but until getting protections had worked a low-wage job at a hotel. Now, he’s a molecular oncology specialist in a medical lab in Salt Lake City, and he’s volunteered to help with coronavirus test diagnosing, although he hasn’t been selected yet. Suasnavas is married, has two young children, and owns a home and two cars. He was 12 when he came to the U.S. from Ecuador after an economic crisis there. He moved with his family to Logan, Utah, and was considering moving to Mexico, where his wife is from, before he got DACA protections.
His wife woke him up Thursday to deliver the good news.
“I don’t want to sound cocky but right now especially with what’s going on, working in a medical lab, it showed that we are essential to keep contributing to the country,” Suasnavas said.
Sumbul Siddiqui
Age: 27
Lives: Chicago area
Country of Origin: Pakistan
Growing up in the state of Georgia, Sumbul Siddiqui remembers struggling to find and pay for medical care for her parents — Pakistani immigrants who’ve had visas pending approval for nearly 20 years and didn’t have health insurance. That hardship inspired Sumbul, the eldest of four siblings, to pursue a career in medicine. She’s a second-year medical student at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and wants to focus on public health. “It helps me connect more to underserved communities,” she said. “Understanding the struggle helps me advocate for them more.”
Born in Saudi Arabia and brought to the U.S. at 4, Siddiqui has relied on DACA since 2013 to go to school. But she often worries about being separated from her parents and three siblings. One has DACA and two are native-born U.S. citizens.
She’s been to Pakistan once. She met her relatives for the first time, but felt like an outsider, speaking Urdu with an accent. “I learned how American I am,” she said.
After learning about the Supreme Court ruling, Siddiqui began crying, saying she can now plan to finish her medical training.
“I’ve had so much anxiety and it feels like something has lifted off my shoulders,” she said. “We are finally feeling some relief.”
Belen Sisa
Age: 26
Lives: Gilbert, Arizona
Country of origin: Argentina
Born in Buenos Aires, Belen Sisa and her family came to the United States as tourists when she was 6 and overstayed their visas. At the time, Argentina was in the midst of an economic recession.
The family settled in Arizona, where Belen grew up in the Phoenix area.
While majoring in political science and history at Arizona State University, she co-founded the organization Undocumented Students for Education Equity. She also became politically active as a DACA recipient, helping organize student marches and protesting deportations of immigrants.
“I would say that the biggest benefit DACA gave me was a sense of empowerment and control over my future,” Sisa said. “The moment DACA was announced it was a catalyst to my involvement in activism and politics that eventually led me to where I am and who I am now. It gave many of us the confidence to fight for more and that is what we are doing now.”
Sisa said she was overjoyed by the high court’s ruling.
“It’s great to know that DACA lives and we can continue our fight,” Sisa said. “It is great to have the anxiety over.”
Tony Valdovinos
Age: 29
Lives: Phoenix
Country of origin: Mexico
Phoenix political consultant Tony Valdovinos didn’t learn he was born in Colima, Mexico, and brought to the U.S. when he was 2 until he tried to join the Marine Corps at 18. He said the family had immigrated to the U.S. because his father was having problems finding work amid slowing economic growth.
Valdovinos became involved in politics and, after working on a local campaign in 2012, an attorney began helping him and some other young immigrants get together all their documents so they could apply for the DACA program. He later served as a campaign manager for Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego when she first ran for City Council.
A local musical called “Americano!,” which played to sold-out audiences earlier this year, was inspired by Valdovinos’ life.
After the court ruled on Thursday, Valdovinos said he could better focus on the campaign of Yassamin Ansari, a Phoenix City Council candidate.
“It was such a terrible standoff, waiting for a decision for so long without being able to do anything,” Valdovinos said. “Everything we knew could change, so I decided to stay focused on my life and getting our story out to the world. I never wanted to live in fear as an immigrant after our mom brought us here so we wouldn’t starve.”
Marisol Estrada
Age: 26
Lives: Atlanta
Country of origin: Mexico
One of Marisol Estrada’s earliest memories is walking the desert to cross the border when she was 5. A majority of DACA recipients are from Mexico. She wasn’t scared at the time, she just did what her parents told her to. But she realizes now it was probably dangerous. Still, Estrada is glad her parents brought her to the U.S., where she is safer and has had greater opportunities.
Estrada was in high school and looking to get her first job when she discovered she didn’t have legal status. She started researching universities in Mexico and was thinking of going back when Obama enacted DACA the summer before her senior year of high school.
Because of the program, Estrada was able to graduate from college with a degree in political science in three years and is about to start law school. She hopes to practice immigration law.
Estrada said she had to read the ruling three times before she grasped what it meant. “I couldn’t make it past the second page because my palms were shaking,” she said.
“It’s a big win but at the end of the day there’s a lot of people that we will need to fight for,” she said, referring to the estimated 11 million people living in the country without permission. “So I’m happy but very cautiously happy.”
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Associated Press reporters Anita Snow in Phoenix, Sophia Tareen in Chicago and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Court rejects Trump bid to end young immigrants’ protections
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants, the second stunning election-season rebuke from the court in a week after its ruling that it’s illegal to fire people because they’re gay or transgender.
Immigrants who are part of the 8-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program will retain their protection from deportation and their authorization to work in the United States — safe almost certainly at least through the November election, immigration experts said.
The 5-4 outcome, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices were in the majority, seems certain to elevate the issue in Trump’s campaign, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first presidential run in 2016 and immigration restrictions his administration has imposed since then.
The justices said the administration did not take the proper steps to end DACA, rejecting arguments that the program is illegal and that courts have no role to play in reviewing the decision to end it. The program covers people who have been in the United States since they were children and are in the country illegally. In some cases, they have no memory of any home other than the U.S.
Trump didn’t hold back in his assessment of the court’s work, hitting hard at a political angle.
“These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!” he wrote on Twitter, apparently including the LGBT ruling as well.
In a second tweet, he wrote, “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”
Later, he said the decision showed the need for additional conservative justices to join the two he has appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and pledged to release a new list from which he would choose a nominee if another opening occurs on his watch. Both of his appointees dissented on Thursday, though Gorsuch wrote the LGBT rights ruling.
Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden pledged to send Congress proposed legislation on his first day in office to make DACA protections permanent.
Roberts, with whom Trump has sparred, wrote for the court that the administration did not pursue the end of the program properly.
“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,“ Roberts wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients.”
The Department of Homeland Security can try again, he wrote. But any new order to end the program, and the legal challenge it would provoke, would likely take months, if not longer.
“No way that’s going to happen before November,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell University Law School.
The court’s four conservative justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, wrote that DACA was illegal from the moment it was created under the Obama administration in 2012. Thomas called the ruling “an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”
Alito wrote that federal judges had prevented DACA from being ended “during an entire Presidential term. Our constitutional system is not supposed to work that way.”
Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a separate dissent that he was satisfied that the administration acted appropriately.
DACA recipients were elated by the ruling.
“We’ll keep living our lives in the meantime,” said Cesar Espinosa, who leads the Houston immigration advocacy group FIEL. “We’re going to continue to work, continue to advocate.”
Espinosa said he got little sleep overnight in anticipation of a possible decision. In the minutes after the decision was posted, he said his group was “flooded with calls with Dreamers, happy, with that hope that they’re going to at least be in this country for a while longer.”
From the Senate floor, the Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said of the DACA decision, “I cried tears of joy.”
“Wow,” he went on, choking up. “These kids, these families, I feel for them, and I think all of America does.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas had a different take, labeling DACA illegal and focusing his wrath on Roberts.
“Yet John Roberts again postures as a Solomon who will save our institutions from political controversy and accountability. If the Chief Justice believes his political judgment is so exquisite, I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected,” Cotton said in a statement.
The program grew out of an impasse over a comprehensive immigration bill between Congress and the Obama administration in 2012. President Barack Obama decided to formally protect people from deportation while also allowing them to work legally in the U.S.
But Trump made tough talk on immigration a central part of his campaign and less than eight months after taking office, he announced in September 2017 that he would end DACA.
Immigrants, civil rights groups, universities and Democratic-led states quickly sued, and courts put the administration’s plan on hold.
The Department of Homeland Security has continued to process two-year DACA renewals so that hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients have protections stretching beyond the election and even into 2022. No new applications have been accepted since 2017, and it probably would take a court order to change that, Yale-Loehr said.
The Supreme Court fight over DACA played out in a kind of legal slow motion. The administration first wanted the justices to hear and decide the case by June 2018. The justices said no. The Justice Department returned to the court later in 2018, but the justices did nothing for more than seven months before agreeing a year ago to hear arguments. Those took place in November and more than seven months elapsed before the court’s decision.
Thursday’s ruling was the second time in two years that Roberts and the liberal justices faulted the administration for the way it went about a policy change. Last year, the court forced the administration to back off a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
In 2018, Roberts joined his conservative colleagues to preserve Trump’s travel ban affecting several countries with largely Muslim populations. In that instance, Roberts wrote the administration put the policy — or at least its third version — in place properly.
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Associated Press writers Jessica Gresko, Lisa Mascaro in Washington, Astrid Galvan in Phoenix, Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.